


Queen of Hearts

by denimdisaster



Category: Persona 5
Genre: ... kind of, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Sleepovers, baby bisexual ann, face masks in more than one meaning of the term, lesbian? bisexual? who knows. life is confusing, makoto's hot motorcycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 09:57:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14713886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/denimdisaster/pseuds/denimdisaster
Summary: Makoto held her heart in one well-manicured hand.





	Queen of Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the GirlsGirlsGirls! zine that I participated in a while back :3  
> i actually dont know if its still available for purchase but i thought it was finally time for me to publish this ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> hope u like it!!

There was something enchanting about Makoto’s hands.  
  
  
There was a lot of enchanting things about her, actually, but the way she moved her slender fingers across her face, spreading the gooey tomato mask, was absolutely eye catching and Ann wanted nothing more than to touch her - her cheek, her hands, it didn’t matter. But God, her hands. There was something slightly obscene about watching Makoto’s nimble fingers dip into the cream and rub steady, careful circles on her face. She was suddenly thankful that she hadn’t bought the edible facemasks like she had been considering doing, because there was no way in hell that she would have been able to stand Makoto taking those fingers into her mouth, licking them clean with a tongue far too precise-  
  
“Ah, Ann? Is there something wrong?”  
  
Dark, deep - so deep she got lost in them, would drown in them if she could - brown eyes turned to look at her, and Ann was uncomfortably aware that she had been caught staring.

“Nothing!” She squeaked, shaking her head so violently that the hand which had stilled on her cheek - frozen in place by the sheer beauty of Nijima Makoto - smeared the rice mask into the hair around her temple, and she had the distant thought that it was going to be really annoying to clean. Should have followed Makoto’s example with the diadem to hold her hair back. She looked like she knew what she was doing - like she always did, flawless no matter what she tried to do, even when she failed it looked like she did it on purpose, landed with a grace Ann hadn’t seen in any other person before - and Ann wondered how often she did this.

Not the sleepovers. It had been quite clear that she wasn’t very used to those.

Herself, she had had quite a lot of them. She had been a lonely child, after all, parents away far too often for her liking, and she liked girls, liked hanging out with them long before she realized that she was into them. And then she had quit the sleepovers for a while. Not because she thought Suzui would hold it against her, or something - as if sweet, kind Suzui would be anything but accepting -, but she couldn’t tell her, didn’t feel good about sleeping in the same room as a girl she crushed on whilst trying to pretend that it was all normal.

She told her eventually. It was nerve wrecking, even though she knew that Suzui would never abandon her, and the feelings had faded by the time she let her know, but she told her. Far too late, after Kamoshida, after she had tried to… kill herself, and Ann wasn’t sure if it would have helped for her to know - know that someone genuinely loved her, or if it would have added more unnecessary stress to her life, knowing that her best and only? friend was someone who had ulterior motives for hanging out with her.

She wasn’t sure if she liked boys, too. Thought so. But it was hard to tell - everyone had told her ever since she was a child that she had to like boys and that she couldn’t like girls in the way she did, and she wasn’t sure what were her emotions and what were someone else’s. It didn’t really matter. She wanted nothing to do with men, not after Kamoshida, and she hadn’t been very hyped about them from the start, either. Even if she could fall in love with them she didn’t want to. Not now.

Though she supposed that part of the reason for that lied in the fact that she was so deeply in love with Makoto. How could she not be? She was smart, she was pretty, she was unexpectedly kind and funny, she always knew what to do, had her brain with her. She was strong. Those very fingers that had so carefully applied the facemask and now drummed softly against the floor, those very fingers belonged to hands belonged to arms that could easily snap her in half. Ann found it really, really hot. Knowing how gentle Makoto was with her when she could break her arm without breaking a sweat… It was enticing, exciting. The girl before her could break stone floor through sheer force of will, could kill a hundred shadows with or without her Persona, and yet managed to be one of the kindest people Ann had ever met, careful in every one of her actions. It felt like a privilege to know the side of her that could fiercely stand up to the very man that threatened to destroy her life, and it was a privilege to know the side of her that had anxiously avoided touching any furniture in Ann’s home, stiffly clutching her bag - because it was so different from the Makoto she had thought she knew. It was human. Makoto was human. She wasn’t ruthless, she wasn’t cold, she wasn’t apathetic. She was just unsure of herself. And Ann had never been given any reason to believe her to be anything other than what everyone thought that she was. Until recently, that was. And she turned out to have such a lovely personality, on top of having such a lovely face, hands, skin, legs - Ann was completely and desperately smitten from the moment Makoto had whipped out a Persona. Had casually revealed that she knew how to ride a motorbike. As if that wasn’t the hottest thing Ann had ever heard of.

  
For a brief moment, as she watched Makoto check something on her phone, smile at it, she considered telling her. Not that she crushed on her - never, that was far too embarrassing, she didn’t want to spoil the evening by getting rejected. But she considered telling her that she liked girls. She was about to do it, spur of the moment, but the words died on her tongue and she chickened out. Didn’t know why it was so difficult to tell her.

She had told Ryuji, after all, and that had gone well. Although she supposed that that was a special case, since he was bisexual too, and since he told her first. She had been surprised when he called her. He never wanted to hang out with her, and she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be flattered or suspicious - it was Ryuji, after all, and even though his delinquent rumors were unfounded, he still made a lot of reckless decisions and did a lot of dangerous things that she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a part of. But he had sounded nervous, and not meeting up with him had been out of the question, especially when he said that he wanted to meet at the hideout, because he had something to tell her.

He hadn’t looked her in the eyes when he told her. He had bit his lip - a nervous tick she hadn’t seen on him since they were little and assumed he had dropped - and looked out at the city below them. But his voice had been loud and clear when he said it. It didn’t waver and he didn’t falter. Not even when he told her that he had a crush on Akira, that that was what made him realize it, not even when he was at his most vulnerable did he hesitate to show it off. She would deny it till the day she died, but she admired that mental strength. And the fact that he was so sure of it made it easy for her to tell him. Ryuji had gotten wide eyes, comically surprised as always, but he had stayed quiet, waited for her to finish talking before telling her that _I can see why you’re into Nijima_ , and _Good luck_. It wasn’t so different from when she had told Suzui.

Makoto was looking at the clock, drumming her fingers again, and Ann made a decision. She had said that she wanted to be strong. That she wanted to be more like Makoto - fearless, brave. It was about time that she did something about that instead of just thinking about it.

 

“Makoto,” she said, and Makoto turned to look at her.

Her face was red with the facemask she had on, head cocked slightly to one side in anticipation. She was beautiful, and Ann felt far too hot for her liking. Focus.

“Oh? Did you finish your philosophizing?” She said and smiled, a soft smile, one that turned Ann’s insides to mush, mush that was alive and warm, crawling around inside her. “Mind telling me what you came up with?”  
  
“Makoto,” she repeated. “Do you like girls?”

The smile didn’t fall. If anything, Ann could imagine that it grew wider, more excited.  
  
“So you finally caught on?” Makoto asked. “I do.”

“What do you mean, finally?”

She got a laugh out of that, another laugh that churned the mush in her stomach, froze it and then heated it again and Ann didn’t know what to do to make the feeling go away, wasn’t sure if she wanted it to.

“Ann,” Makoto said and chuckled a little, touched her hair, “I have a motorcycle,” she said, as if that explained anything, and maybe it did. Maybe she should have seen signs, or something like that, but no one had ever pointed them out to her. No one had told her what to look for.

“Anyways,” she said and coughed a little into her fist, barely hiding her smile at Ann’s shocked face, “I’m a bit surprised you didn’t notice before Ryuji. Ah, it’s a bit of a shame that you didn’t find out earlier, I could’ve gotten at least some of my money back…”

“Ryuji noticed?!” And then the second part of what she said hit her, as if her statement about Ryuji having a more finetuned gaydar than she did wasn’t weird enough. “You bet on it?”

Makoto nodded. “Futaba, she… I admit, I was a little curious as to who would bring it up first, and she proposed that we bet a small amount of money on it.” She sighed. “And yes, Ryuji asked me about it a month or so ago.”

A little before he had come out to her, Ann thought. Realized that that was probably why he sounded so confident when he wished her good luck with her crush.

“I… Me too,” Ann said lamely, not how she had planned on coming out. “Both, I mean.”

Makoto’s smile was uncomfortably knowing. “I know, Ann.”

“You know?! How?” She asked, baffled.

She nodded. “It’s not that hard to figure out, when you’re aware that you’re gay. Ah, but I have a rather good gaydar too, I would say, though perhaps not as good as Yusuke’s…” She muttered to herself before remembering Ann and waving her hands in front of her face. “Ah, but don’t worry! I don’t think anyone outside the Phantom Thieves knows! And Morgana doesn’t, I promise!”

Her head was swimming. Was she that easy to figure out?

“Everyone… Knows?”

Makoto cocked her head again, surprised, then turned to herself, muttering that _if she didn’t figure out about me, why should she…_ , shook her head, turned to Ann.

“It’s only Morgana out of us who’s straight, Ann – Yusuke, Akira, Haru and I are gay, and the other two are bi, like you. Honestly, how didn’t you get that Yusuke…”

“Can I kiss you?” She interrupted on a whim she hadn’t wanted herself to follow through with, swallowed, hands sweating with the anxiety, balled into fists so tightly that her nails were leaving marks in her palms, stomach turning again.

Makoto glanced at the clock. “No,” she said and turned away from her, faced the sink, turned the tap.

It took everything in her willpower not to start crying on the spot. And even so, her determination only lasted for a few seconds before it pathetically crumbled, the tears in her eyes spilling over, washing trails in the rice mask on her face.

Of course she didn’t want to, just because she liked girls, of course she didn’t like Ann out of all people just because of that, she probably wasn’t even her type. Though maybe she was, and she just didn’t like her, too loud, too brash, too dumb, not good enough for perfect, scholarly Makoto who did everything perfectly-

The tap water ran for an uncomfortably long time.

She cried until she had no tears left, and still they had dried on her face by the time Makoto turned off the faucet, patted her face dry and looked over at her with eyes that likely widened as she took in her appearance, Ann wouldn’t know, couldn’t make herself look at her.

“Ann…?”

And then it seemed to click for her. Makoto was clever, after all, there was no way she didn’t see the giant, fuzzy cloud of feelings she harbored, and she braced herself for pity, for an “I’m sorry”, for being left alone or for being handled as though she was made of glass through the evening until she couldn’t take it anymore, until she actually broke, if she hadn’t already.

She wasn’t prepared for the soft touch of Makoto’s strong fingers threading through her hair. She certainly wasn’t prepared for the tiny kiss on her scalp. And though she was prepared for a “sorry”, she wasn’t prepared for it to be followed by an “I only meant for us to wash off the masks first” and another kiss on her hairline, lips carefully avoiding the white smear of rice on her face.

Ann hadn’t thought it was possible to feel this many emotions in that short amount of time before Makoto waltzed into her life, with perfect, swaying, dancing steps. Shock, confusion, sadness, confusion, happiness, love, confusion again.

The water felt cold against the pink heat of her skin. Facemask and tears came off in a greyish white mess and she could feel Makoto’s eyes on her, watching, waiting.

Perhaps she hadn’t been alone in doing so. The thought made her giddy, the warm mush in her stomach content and excited, and she cleaned her face quicker than she normally would have, dried her face more forcefully, no doubt forgetting a few white flakes in her hair. Makoto would chastise her about it, she thought with a smile.

She didn’t. Not until later, not until after Ann had been kissed enough to forget her name, everything about the Phantom Thieves, the hollow loneliness which she had been trying to escape since childhood. But she hadn’t been the only impatient one. They were falling in together, and Ann knew that as long as strong, careful, beautiful Makoto was by her side, holding her hand with nimble fingers, they would figure it all out together.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> nya ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ


End file.
